I recently wrote about the Death of the Away Message. Communications are so pervasive, so ubiquitous, so tethering, that we never really can disconnect – if that’s what we seek. Someone replied with a gentle suggestion regarding my vacation: “Unplug a little if you can.”

A kind enough nudge from someone seemingly concerned about my enjoying a little R&R during my vacation.

But to many home officers, micropreneurs and small business owners, a simple, paradoxical equation prevails when presented the prospect of a vacation:

Time Away From the Office = Reductions in Billable Work = Lost Income Potential / Revenues

Multiply that equation by three weeks on the road, and the result can be downright devastating to the bottom line. To paraphrase my friend Jim Blasingame at the Small Business Advocate, “As a small business owner, if you don’t kill, you don’t eat.”

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Seth Godin wrote recently of “the end of magic.” He was lamenting how the newness of the new seems to have passed us by — how the really cool tools and applications that once wowed us in the workplace and life now are so commonplace that they are taken for granted, and no longer harbingers of Wow!

Wait. Take a moment to ponder the tools we use and what they bring to our daily lives. You might respectfully disagree.

Every day, I use services and tools that keep me connected with the world outside in ways that still seem magical. My BlackBerry brings the Internet and its motherlode of possibilities to a device smaller than a deck of cards (iPhone users will only smirk at the possibilities borne from their device).

Want to contact a peer, client or someone else from my database? Will that be by phone (office, mobile, home, “other”?), or email, or SMS, or MMS?

Add a new name to Google Contacts — and it’s “magically” duplicated in my BlackBerry. Send an email from my phone and it instantly appears in GMail.

As I prepare to head out on Home Office Highway once again this year, I think about the tools that’ll keep me connected from the road.

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After two weeks on the road, it’s the simple observations that bring clarity to the home office adventure. Like…

– Sponsor or no, the Verizon Mifi ‘personal hotspot’ won the day — hands down. It was a true fan favorite and winner of the HOH’09 Product of Choice. Hey, anything that keeps the hoards from beating me up for my Internet connection is worthy of praise. Teleworkers and road warriors alike will find this tool extremely useful.

-Yes, family, we WILL survive two weeks without a TV. And we did. We talked, played more Yahtzee and Racko than we ever thought possible, and watched burning embers in the fire pit. And yes, we surfed the Web. A lot. Truth be told, we watched a few DVD movies on Zack’s HP laptop. But that’s NOT TV.

– Open a bag of animal crackers, and a dog’s nose knows. “Food, food, food…”

– “Yes, Mom, Spaghetti-Ohs make a perfectly suitable breakfast.”

Belkin Clap On Surge Suppressor

– Success is in the gadgets you choose. Like the Belkin Clamp On surge suppressor that, well, clamped on to the edge of the bunk and supplied power to all our gadgets (no small feat, given the number of gadgets we employed).

– When plugs aren’t available, old-fashioned cigarette lighters will work. Just the ticket for the Scosche reCoil retractable car charger for iPod and iPhone.

– Netbooks beget adaptors and accessories. And manufacturers are responding. The Targus Netbook Accessory Kit includes a nifty USB hub, a travel mouse and a slip case for netbooks with screens up to 10.1 inches. Read More »

Is the cloud-driven mobile home office a place of faith, or expectations?

Call it a leap of faith.

Every time my family travels on Home Office Highway, I load up a flash drive with documents, files and notes for stories and columns in progress.

This year, except for a flash-drive built into a card reader for my camera, I brought no portable drive.

All my documents, files and notes were / are stored in the Cloud. Notes for my columns, interviews for pending stories, even all the notes related to our destinations, RV parks and other trip details were stored either to Google Notes, Gmail or Google Docs. Read More »

You can learn a lot — and be scared to death — by reading book reviews.

I was in my home office flipping through Newsweek’s 50 Books to Read Right Now looking for books to take on the road trip.

I came across No. 4 on the list: The Big Switch: Rewiring The World, From Edison to Google, by Nicholas Carr. This bestseller is touted as “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing” by Financial Times.

Fair enough. Then The New Humanist chimed in: “Carr may take a somewhat apocalyptic view of the vast technological and social issues which a move to utility computing will raise, not least those of privacy, ownership and access, but he makes a compelling case for its desirability in a world where the network is pervasive. Whether we go gently into this world is, of course, up to us, but with the insight offered here we will at least be prepared to understand the consequences of our choices earlier in the process rather than later. ”

Truth be told, we all live in the cloud. Teleworkers who log on from home. Road warriors who access the corporate server via a customer’s conference room. Home officers who open the HP at some Starbucks to check Gmail or Google Docs. Moms on AOL. Dads checking their fantasy league stats. Bloggers blogging, tweeps tweeting, friends Facebooking.

We all live in the cloud.

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OK, so I can get a bit philosophical when discussing Henry David Thoreau and the implications of travel, home office and family life. Listen as I chat with Rich Roffman and Wanda Myles of The Rich Roffman Show.

I’m sitting at my kitchen counter, HP laptop powered up, and pondering what we just completed.

Home Office Highway was an unbelievable exercise, in freedom, family, adventure, escape, work / life balance (and then some), technology and the power tools that empower the remote worker, personalities, workstyles, and what it takes to get all these concepts to meet up on the same page.

I have no doubt that we’ll do this again. I’ve spoken with my partners, and the interest is there. My clients were buoyed by the concept, and for the most part, were none the wiser — or at least didn’t seem to mind — that I was working from Lord knows where.

To be sure, there’s some balancing that needs working out. A few thoughts in retrospect… Read More »

In Home Office Highway, we’ve tried to do our part for the environment — and our health.

We’ve seen the decline of our world. We drove through Atlanta, where a persistent drought is raising serious questions about long-term solutions. We visited the state’s northeast, where dropping water levels are plainly and shockingly apparently.

We had to do better. We have no paper goods, aside from napkins, tissues and paper towels (we have two cloth kitchen towels that do the bulk of the wiping and drying), and the paper of our journal. We’re eating off Corele chip- and scratch-resistant plates with actual silverware, drinking from sturdy plastic cups, and re-using water bottles. To wash, we’re doing the “fill one sink with soapy water, the other with fresh” to do the dishes.

The intention of this trip was not to be a burden on the environment, but to enjoy Mother Nature without eco-guilt. We’ve done a fairly good job. We’ve cooked out (ever had Rocky Mountain toast cooked over an open fire?), recycled where possible, and tried to minimize our waste. Read More »